Abstract

The adoption of ICTs by the government has provided opportunities for interaction between the government and her citizens. This has also introduced new steps to be taken towards the future of democracy. The future of democracy entails full participation and engagement of citizens in socio-political and economic decision-making through e-deliberation system. This is already being adopted in some continent including Europe and Asia but yet to be fully embraced by African countries such as Nigeria. Citizen participation in decision-making is very important as their views, opinions and perspectives must always be taken into consideration. The main aim of this study therefore is to investigate the salient requirements for the design and implementation of an e-deliberation system, which creates a platform for deliberation between citizens and their representatives in government and government ministries and agencies. The case study used in this study is the Federal Ministry of Power, works and Housing in Nigeria. The outcome of this research work is a system prototype developed which is aimed at fostering citizen’s participation & engagement in Government decision-making via e-deliberation. The system prototype was developed using PHP, JavaScript, CSS, bootstrap and XAMPP server. Although a fully scale functional evaluation of the system is in-view, however, the first hand user testing done revealed that that system achieved its basic minimum requirements.